The Postcard and the Frontline

This chapter focuses on how dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or elimination and transformation, underpinned the UPPs by examining the everyday practices of policing at Santa MartaSanta Marta  and Alemão, the two extremes of the pacification project. It discusses the complementarity and tension between militarized repression and attempts to assert a new moral order on the ground in pacified communities, exploring the religious tropes that informed this order. It shows how a militarized worldview contributes to a strict division between good and evil and how racialized policing is legitimized through a rhetoric of cultural difference, as well as the different strategies employed by the police to produce a new and upstanding citizen, respectful of police authority.